1. Technical Field
The present disclosure generally relates to methods and systems for improving the efficiency of a document production environment, such as a print shop. More specifically, the present disclosure relates to methods and systems for performing performance characterization of data derived from resources in a document production environment using a queuing model.
2. Background
Document production environments, such as print shops, convert printing orders, such as print jobs, into finished printed material. A print shop may process print jobs using resources, such as printers, cutters collators and other similar equipment. Typically, resources in print shops are organized such that when a print job arrives from a customer at a particular print shop, the print job can be processed by performing one or more production functions.
Over time, resources used in document production environments have been provided with network interfaces. In addition, equipment manufacturers have started to provide software development kits and application programming interfaces that can be used to query machines to retrieve machine status and print job characteristics, such as time stamps or other timing information. As such, analyzing data from networked resources in order to characterize resource behavior has become more commonplace.
One method of characterizing performance data in document production environments has been through the use of discrete event simulation models. Scheduling architectures that organize print jobs received by a document production environment and can be used to route the print jobs are known in the art. Exemplary scheduling architectures are described in, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 7,051,328 to Rai et al. and U.S. Pat. No. 7,065,567 to Squires et al. The exemplary scheduling architectures use simulation models to characterize and analyze resources in a document production environment in an attempt to optimize the performance of the environment.
While these scheduling architectures can organize and route print jobs received by a document production environment, such architectures operate based on discrete events such as receiving or processing an individual print job. However, using discrete event simulation models to characterize and analyze resources in a document production environment might not provide a compact and computationally efficient description of the environment, such as a closed-form equation or an approximation for one or more of the parameters in the system.